The Honeycrisp Essentials
As I wrote one year ago in Honeycrisp Apples: Sweet As Honey and Crisp As, Ah, A Really Crisp Apple2,
The Honeycrisp, true to its name, is the sweetest apple I’ve found. Theoretically, sweetness may not appeal to every palate, but the Honeycrisp consistently rates highly in blind taste tests, and I’ve yet to meet that individual who, on trying this apple, has found the gustatory sensation anything other than delicious. The taste is, in fact, sufficiently intense that I typically eschew chomping directly into a Honeycrisp, opting instead to slice it into small pieces and savor the smaller bites. I also find that, while I take great pleasure from the taste, I am ordinarily satisfied with half an apple and set aside the rest for another time.
And the texture, nicely captured in the phrase “explosively crisp,”3 is to my taste, perfect.
This apple’s appearance does, however, fall considerably short of spectacular and, as the supply on hand at my local market dwindles, approaches unappealing, with many lumps, bumps, and asymmetry among the specimens. Nonetheless, I’ve found even these unattractive examples to be delicious, sweet, and exceedingly crisp.
Indeed, I have yet to find a single Honeycrisp apple that was not delicious, sweet, and exceedingly crisp.
The Horticultural, Agronomic, Botanical, and Economic Aspects of the Honeycrisp
This non-impressionistic background data is actually pretty darn interesting, but I covered the primary points last year and, rather than produce another version of the same content, I invite readers to peruse my jeremiad re the decline of apples in general and the Braeburn in particular, to meet the parents of the Honeycrisp (the Macoun and Honeygold4 apples) and their matchmaker (the University of Minnesota), to discover the peak season of and storage instructions for the Honeycrisp, and, most importantly, to understand the reason I believe the exquisiteness of the Honeycrisp is safe for now but at risk after 2008, all of which can be found at Honeycrisp Apples: Sweet As Honey and Crisp As, Ah, A Really Crisp Apple.
And, speaking of last year’s news, Heck of a Guy would like to welcome the Chicago Tribune to the Honeycrisp bandwagon. The October 10, 2007 edition of the Trib carried a story about the Honeycrisp written by Susan Taylor, called One sexy apple, which differs from the 2006 Heck of a Guy Honeycrisp essay primarily by virtue of the Tribune’s inclusion of recipes for Honeycrisp apple salad, Pan-seared scallops with Honeycrisp apple and celery leaves, and Grilled radicchio and Honeycrisp apple salad with balsamic vinaigrette. This blog’s post, in contrast, contained no cooking or preparation tips other than my recommendation to cut these specimens into slices rather than chomping directly into the hitherto inviolate fruit lest the intensity of the taste overwhelm ones ability to appreciate it. So, if you have 4 heads of radicchio, some shallots, a handful of walnuts, and a batch of scallops that are in danger of going bad on you unless they are used right away, then the Chicago Tribune Food Section is where you should head first. If, on the other hand, you just want to read about a really good eating apple, … well, by now you know where you can find my stuff.
As I’ve Said Before - Again
One of my buddies, to whom I had sent an Honeycrisp harvest alert two or three years ago, complained that the only content of my email was material about this apple and demanded information about my children, social life, and reading. My reply conveniently summarizes this post as well:
are more reliably gratifying and, despite their premium price,
less expensive than offspring, girlfriends, and literature.
Credit Due Department: All photos are from The University of Minnesota Honeycrisp Apples Photo page
Footnotes
- While I selected a new lead photo for this year’s Honeycrisp homage, I am convinced that any change to the caption used in last year’s Heck of a Guy Honeycrisp post could only attenuate its impact ↩
- Minor editorial revisions have been made in these paragraphs but hardly enough to try passing this section off as new work. ↩
- ”Explosively crisp” and variations of this phrase appear so frequently in reference to Honeycrisps that I suspect it is part of the marketing campaign; it does nonetheless effectively evoke the sensation of biting into one of these specimens1
-
1. I now have, in 2007, indirect evidence that the above speculation, made in my 2006 Honeycrisp post, is on point. The graphic shown below is an official media-ready photo made available in high resolution on the University of Minnesota Honeycrisp Photos download page from the folks who created and promote the Honeycrisp.
One may quibble over distinctions between apples associated with fireworks and apples associated with explosives, but I maintain that those marketing motifs are too similar for their application to a single type of apple to be coincidence. - The Honeygold itself is a product of the union of the Golden Delicious and Haralson ↩
